Warmest welcome to our readers, present and future, to our friends, acquaintances and unaquaintances. It is with great honour that we welcome you to our website where you will be able to get to know us, see what we offer, contact us, and also read a lot of interesting and informative essays.

We are a group of young enthusiasts who have recently started our project called NAIVE and we would like to introduce ourselves; who we are, what we are, what we do, how do we do it, what do we want, how do we make it happen and what are we hoping for. NAIVE is an English word and a famous painting movement in Podravina (Croatia) which includes the renowned Hlebine School. Besides that, the word “naivan” is an adjective in Croatian language where it has a somewhat pejorative implication. Croatian language portal defines the term as “innocence, inexperience, limitation”, but with a help of etymology, that wonderful linguistic tool, one might discover that the word actually originates from French word “naïf” where it means “natural, instinctive”. The roots of the word come all the way from Latin where the word “nativus” means “innate, natural, indigenous”. Therefore, the word “naïve” should be understood through all of the given contexts in order to truly experience its true meaning, depth and potential. To be natural, innocent and instinctive are characteristics that all people possess, especially in their early years, and which they aspire to or after which they long for later in life. Our mission and activity rests on those characteristics, and that is one of the reasons why we named this project the way we did. More about naïve as an artistic movement can be found on the website of Croatian museum of naïve in Zagreb, and the following passage almost poetically describes this style: “In naïve, emotion is superior to rationality and intellectual speculations, in most cases naïve expresses joy of life and victory of Hope. Within it we can discover ‘forgotten nature’ and ‘faded childhood’, tales and dreams, imagination that came to life and simple human ideas, forgotten ‘wonder about the world’ and joy over motifs. However, naïve is not just some Arcadian art and idyll, it does not exclusively express hope and celebration of life, there are also some surd sayings, dark accords and the chthonic, in naïve we also meet tragic and symbolic, fantasy and irrationality, surreal relationships, somnambulism and absurdity, which means that it is made of many opposites, just like Life.”

Another great reason for our name is our origin; NAIVE is a group or collective of young artists – painters and graphic designers from Koprivnica, Podravina and Zagreb. Life and space closeness, ambivalent nature of naïve (as stated in the quote above), but mostly our artistic expression and style: all of these condition have naïve as their common denominator and the name was actually organically imposed. The project itself was carefully planned and finally crossed from idea into reality at the start of 2021. We extract our inspiration from human introspection and artists’ interactions with themselves and nature through mysticism and crude reality. The products of that inspiration are placed in the real world with the help of common and unavoidable mediums – clothes and paper, by using one of the oldest and finest printing methods – screen printing. It is “a method of printing by forcing ink through a pattern cut into a piece of cloth stretched across a frame; also serigraphy (from Latin sericus: silky) or silk-screen printing”. What we are especially proud of is that we conduct the entire printing process ourselves and through it we show the value of handicraft and visual identity which such mediums communicate. Another fact that we are proud of is that, along functionality, a great emphasis is also put on the design creativity. More specifically, we offer services of graphic design in close and detailed arrangement with the client using our creativity and the art of expression with an absolute respect to clients’ preferences. Graphic design services that we offer are creations of logos, posters, advertisements, book folds, printing on clothes, and preparation of various designs and formats for printing. Clothes printing is done on hoodies and t-shirts, as well as on canvas bags. Besides that, we also offer original and digital design prints on paper which can decorate walls of any room or be a thoughtful gift (to oneself or to someone else).

Our website contains a gallery of available products which you can inspect in order to get a better impression about our creativity and final products.
We will not mind if you also order some goodies through the same website. Besides gallery, the website also contains a blog where we will try to, in regular intervals, publish interesting texts from different cultural spheres, thematically related to art, history, ethnography and cultural anthropology, music, film and other interesting domains. We might even embark into natural sciences for, indeed, both mathematics and physics are forms of art. However, first thematic block on our repertoire will be culturally anthropological view of tattoos. Through a series of several texts we will travel around the globe, on all continents, in order to see various tattoo techniques, and more interestingly – contexts regarding tattoos, why were they drawn, what did they mean to an individual, and what did they mean to the society, etc. Alongside satisfying our clients’ needs with a combination of creativity, intuition and agreement, our goal is also to expand the knowledge and critical thinking of our readers, to demystify the unknown, and to observe the known from a different point of view.

Even though J. J. Rousseau says that a person is born free, yet is everywhere in chains, we entirely disagree with that. We strongly advocate freedom of expression, creativity and innovation. Naïve characteristics of being indigenous and instinctive are our mantras, creativity is our ideology, and spreading the satisfaction and knowledge is our agenda. We transfer our worldview to functional objects, objects who live their full life and are not exhibits of museum cabinets, torn out of their reality and now just some witnesses of times passed… No! Our objects are unique, alive, distinctive, perfectly imperfect, imperfectly perfect and available to you! Naïve is our treasure and our inspiration and therefore…

Welcome to our interpretation, welcome to NAIVE.

author

SOURCES:
https://hjp.znanje.hr/index.php?show=search_by_id&id=e1dvXRk%3D
https://www.enciklopedija.hr/Natuknica.aspx?ID=56270
https://hmnu.hr/o-naivi/